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DIY: Value Proposition and Positioning

As recently as ten years ago, if you wanted to learn outdoor skills you mainly joined a Boy or Girl Scout troop. While these could be fun groups, they were incredibly limited both by the troop’s interests and the time and skill of their leaders. On top of that, all required being part of the group, which could be challenging if you didn’t match the group’s mold close enough.

Now we have the internet, and sites like DIY, which has many of the interests of Scouting along with updated skills like coding and clothing hacking, all done through an online community.

Initially, I assumed that DIY was out to simply be Scouting 2.0. However, they’re also offering a safer, teen-oriented platform for posting creativity online compared to Youtube, which can be integrated for parents and educators around the world.

While their main value proposition is:

Learn anything and be anyone.

Their secondary tagline can also work as a positioning statement:

DIY is the best place to level up your skills, meet friends, find an audience, and just be awesome.

This can be expanded to:

For teens, DIY is the best place to level up your skills, meet friends, find an audience, and just be awesome through an online platform that connects you to new skills and the DIY community.

Their value proposition is matches their positioning, but focused on the teen user aspect. The value proposition reads to me about self-improvement almost at an entertainer/Youtuber level, with phrases like “find an audience” alongside “just be awesome.” However, the parental positioning focuses on individual skills, mentorship, and teacher connectivity. Given that the site itself highlights usability aspects and potential skills/patches, this matches an intent to reach parents through their children. I’ll be curious to see if they move more into other types of life skills or different ways to be an online presence next.